This Train Beats Walking (Sometimes)

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EXPERIENCED rail travelers recognize it is an almost certain sign of delay when fellow passengers abandon the train and strike off into the surrounding mountains on foot. This may not be very practical wisdom for the average Amtrak passenger, but it could be good to know if, like me, you find yourself riding to meetings in Hanoi through Yunnan Province in China during the summer rainy season.

Maybe I had been too gullible when I read in my guidebook that there was a regular train from Kunming, the capital of the province, to Hanoi. I had been planning to vacation in Yunnan Province and needed to do some reporting in Vietnam. What better way to study the relative benefits of globalization, I thought, than to ride a train across the border from China, newly converted capitalist libertine and aspiring World Trade Organization member, to Vietnam, petulant socialist wallflower?

China had certainly let its hair down in the nine years since my last visit. Kunming, once a proudly dour Communist city, had swapped its olive drab for planters of zinnias. Chengdu, the leafy metropolis with the fiery cuisine in Sichuan Province, to the north of Yunnan, had transformed itself into an explosion of department stores, cellular phones and dot-com ads.

The trains also had undergone a makeover of sorts during that time. The bituminous stench of water boiling for tea endures, but loudspeakers blare the theme of ''Titanic'' instead of old patriotic marches. Gone are the sullen women, pushing dirty mops, who were the conductors. They have been replaced by perky women with pageboy haircuts and dirty mops.

The narrow-gauge railway up the Red River was built by France in 1910 after the country persuaded China to give it mining concessions in Yunnan. China and Vietnam have managed to preserve the same 473-mile railway despite war with the Japanese, Chinese Nationalists, the French, the Americans, and then, deprived of common foes, each other. Now the line accommodates a twice-weekly train with first-class berths for the equivalent of $37.

My ticket read like a Warsaw Pact VCR instruction manual, printed in every language but English -- Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian and German. It came as little surprise that almost no one on the train spoke English, not even the tour group of language teachers from Vietnam sharing the ride. But I was fortunate to be sharing a cabin with a British couple for whom this 18-hour journey was a footnote. They had just survived a week aboard the Trans-Siberian railway, a moving bazaar in which bunks make way for car parts and other assorted goods traversing the global economy.

Our jaunt through the mountains held its own in the misery category. Narrow gauge is railway jargon for tightrope, and the train careered drunkenly through the night. The engineer indulged his fear of head-on collisions with frequent blasts of an earsplitting horn. With the cabin window closed, the sound was just painful, but the heat was unbearable.

Deciding that hearing loss was preferable to suffocation, we voted to open the window, only to be vetoed by our fourth inmate, an antique Vietnamese man. We deferred to the man's age; the window stayed shut.

We turned our efforts instead to persuading a conductor to turn on the air-conditioning. But the railway's frugality dictated that it not be turned on during cool weather, regardless of the temperature inside. After fuming at his console for 10 minutes, the conductor relented by setting the temperature to ''arctic.''

Morning found us semifrozen, our train stalled along a swollen Red River about 25 miles from the border at a muddy village called Lao Fan Zhai. Jungle-covered mountains rose steeply around us. The rains had sent a landslide down over the tracks up ahead. For four hours, we waited, watching the rain clouds play among the lush peaks as tribesmen in colorful attire drifted through the station to gawk at the massive diesel engine.

It was around this time that the local passengers decided to take their chances on foot. To say I wondered if I shouldn't follow them, the cognoscenti, is putting it too mildly. Hoofing it through the frontier appealed to my sense of adventure. But a modern instinct overcame me: I was a paying passenger and the railway had contracted to deliver me, I reasoned. Though the arrival time on my ticket was a joke, I clung to my faith in the agreement's spirit and sated my taste for adventure with a bowl of spicy noodles from the station canteen.

My inertia was rewarded when, through a series of interpreters, we were told that workers were trying to clear the route. Indeed, it wasn't long before men with picks and shovels appeared, having liberated the tracks ahead. We pulled into Hekou, across the border from Lao Cai in Vietnam, at about noon -- nearly two hours after the schedule in Kunming said we were to arrive in Hanoi.

The guidebooks say the Kunming-Hanoi train has been in service for the past seven years, enough time certainly for the Vietnamese and Chinese railway employees to have made clockwork out of the crossing. Those employees apparently were not on duty this particular day.

After our arrival, employees from both countries gathered on the platform to solve the twice-a-week riddle of how to carry passengers from China to Vietnam without letting a Chinese train pass into Vietnam. To accomplish this, our train was stripped to a single car to accommodate those of us continuing to Hanoi. A dilapidated Vietnamese car appeared on the rear to create what appeared to be bilateral travel, but then the Chinese engine rolled away and a Vietnamese engine, toylike by comparison, attached itself to the front.

JUST as the quiz-team leaders were nearing a solution, the extra-credit problem arrived in the form of four Bangladeshi students from Hanoi. Having made a day trip across the border, they now wanted to return. Problem: their visas to re-enter Vietnam weren't in order, but their Chinese visas didn't allow them to stay. China said they had to go back; Vietnam wouldn't take them.

Compounding the confusion, someone realized that there was now a Chinese car sandwiched in the middle of a Vietnamese train. A conductor boarded to shoo us all into the Vietnamese car while a clutch of railway workers on the platform yelled at one another in their respective languages.

By 4 p.m., the two sides had worn themselves into agreement. The Vietnamese engine lugged the Chinese car onto the next track and then returned. A grubby Vietnamese kitchen car was tacked onto the rear and, Bangladeshis on board, we eased across the border.

Immigration officials board the train in Lao Cai to check passports and glance into luggage, so after a brief encounter we were hurtling through the night along the Red River. We adjourned to the kitchen car to celebrate our arrival in Vietnam over tepid beers.

A drenched Hanoi station materialized outside our window at 1 a.m. -- 15 hours behind schedule. It was dark and quiet, and the gates were padlocked. So convincingly had the station shut for the night that we had to persuade the few remaining station employees that we had the right to be released.

Though it lacked the towering department stores of Kunming and Chengdu, Hanoi was in full capitalist embrace just the same. Vietnam had signed a trade pact with the United States while I was in Yunnan. Already, Hanoi's shelves were stocked with Gillette shaving cream, Head & Shoulders shampoo and Colgate toothpaste.

While both China and Vietnam appear open to trade from the rest of the world, the border they share is only semi-permeable, it seems. For no matter how comradely these Communist neighbors may say they are, they still won't accept each other's currency. Neither the hotel, nor the foreign-bank branches -- not even the government-run banks -- would trade Vietnamese dong for my Chinese renminbi. Vietnam and China may be fellow travelers on the road to globalization, but if the crossing at Lao Cai is any indication, they won't be bunking together.